Candace Buckner
Candace Buckner writes national sports columns that use games and athletes to examine how power, identity and everyday life collide. She is a national columnist for The Athletic, building on nearly 25 years covering teams, leagues and sports communities across the country. Her work focuses less on scores than on what sports reveal about workplaces, politics and culture, and how fans and institutions respond.
Sports, culture and workplace friction
Buckner’s columns treat sports workplaces as mirrors of broader office life, including political tension, hierarchy and the pressures on employees with public-facing roles. In one piece on political dissension and NFL players, she frames professional football workplaces as parallel to ordinary offices where colleagues navigate disagreement and ideological divides while still expected to perform.
Her writing in this lane often centers the human realities of employment in high-profile sports jobs, from contracts and job security to public criticism and private doubt.
She has carried this perspective across her career, writing sports commentary and criticism that explores how teams and leagues make decisions, who benefits, and whose discomfort is overlooked. Her columns tend to move away from tactical analysis and toward the emotional and ethical stakes of being a worker in a highly scrutinized entertainment business.
WNBA, women’s basketball and the culture wars around it
Women’s basketball is a core subject of Buckner’s current work, and she approaches it as both a competitive league and a stage for cultural conflict. In a column on Sophie Cunningham and ongoing protests, she details how WNBA conversations have shifted from on-court play to arguments over values, patriotism and activism, and shows how players are pulled into national culture wars even when they insist the focus should be basketball.
She has written about the WNBA’s recurring drama cycle, describing how the league has entered a rinse-and-repeat pattern of public controversies that can overshadow the quality of play yet also signal a growing spotlight.
In a piece on the search for a new WNBA commissioner, she stresses the complexity of leading a league that must be “everything to everyone,” from players and coaches to fans, media partners and corporate sponsors. Buckner frequently centers fans in these stories, as in her column urging WNBA supporters to “raise the roof and the floor” by demanding better coverage and also consistently consuming women’s basketball content.
She writes on the Washington Mystics’ “Young Hos” nickname debate to show how language, branding and humor can either amplify or undercut the confident, unafraid women behind a team’s public image. Her Caitlin Clark coverage follows a similar line, documenting Clark’s historic playoff performances and FIBA break while tracking how one player’s rise reshapes attention, expectations and the business side of women’s basketball.
NFL and the emotional cost of pro football
Buckner’s NFL work emphasizes the emotional and personal toll of the sport on players, teams and their families rather than schematic breakdowns. In her coverage of Colts safety Jonathan Owens, she follows his career “wild ride,” noting how his professional trajectory intersects with his marriage to Simone Biles and how both partners navigate attention, pressure and competing schedules. A column on a painful Colts loss to the Chiefs looks beyond the box score to the accumulation of frustration and grief inside a locker room, arguing that only a future victory can truly ease the lingering hurt.
When she writes about NFL stars dealing with political dissension at work, she frames them as employees facing the same organizational strain as co-workers in any industry, but with their disagreements broadcast and debated at national scale. Across these pieces, Buckner pays close attention to how players narrate their own vulnerability, how coaches talk about resilience, and how fans interpret suffering and redemption within the rhythms of an NFL season.
Long-form columns on race, gender and power in sports
Before joining The Athletic, Buckner developed a distinctive body of work examining race, gender and social power inside sports institutions. Her Washington Post columns were explicitly framed as analysis and essays about how sports influence and reflect cultural and societal understanding, anchoring game stories in broader questions of inequality and representation.
In that role she reported on the WNBA’s conflict with former senator Kelly Loeffler, tracing how players pushed back against an owner whose politics clashed with the league’s values and how that fight fit into a larger story about workplace power. She wrote on the revival of Howard University’s golf team, highlighting how investment, visibility and institutional support can change opportunities for Black athletes in niche sports.
Her piece on Vida Blue examined the struggles of a prominent Black pitcher from the 1970s, connecting his personal challenges to the structural forces that shaped his career.
Earlier in her career she covered the Wizards and the NBA and worked as an enterprise reporter on stories where race, gender and social issues intersected with the games themselves. She has also been recognized repeatedly by Associated Press Sports Editors, including a first-place finish in the Division A column category in 2024 and multiple top-10 honors, and her work has been selected for Best American Sports Writing.
Buckner’s professional path through high school sports, local beats and national columns reinforces a reporting approach that treats every level of sport as a site where power and identity are negotiated.
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